Peacock Bone and Sparkling Wine
He has read her a short passage from The English Patient, and now she sits on the pale blue of the carpet, trying to form a cup with the soft white soles of her feet. Once she thinks she has managed it she motions for him to bring the wine bottle over, and he does so, pours out roughly a glassful of the sparkling white. Crémant.
It tickles, she says, but still holds the cup steady.
He shifts from his knees to lying flat on his belly – taut with hunger, lust – prostrate as though a spy in the hillside someplace, or sunbathing in a warm country he recollects and measures three years away from this, ultraviolet massaging the knotted muscle barnacled about his shoulder blades and the hidden tusks of his ribs.
He sips the wine from off her skin, drawing it upwards with his tongue, catlike. Feline flicking at this, the curved and sealed base of her whole entire form. The insteps. The heels. The crook of each toe.
She breaks out into a laugh, and the cup splits, wine gone flat now spilling into carpet beneath. Turns the blue colour dark. He joins her in laughter, in body. They make love on the stain, and drink the rest of the bottle in the after. Holding its fizz on their separate tongues for as long as they can.
Dan Micklethwaite lives and writes in Yorkshire. Aside from IS&T, his work has either featured or is forthcoming in BULL: Men’s Fiction, Birdville, NFTU and 3:AM. A selection of his poetry and shorter prose is available at: http://smalltimebooks.blogspot.co.uk/.